Artist at MASS MoCA explores implications of production

Artist explores implications of production

By Tim Kane

Published
4:09 pm EDT, Wednesday, March 28, 2018

It's a good thing the exhibit "The Archaeology of Another Possible Future" comes with an instruction manual.

With a vast array of artifacts spread throughout a football field-size gallery, the site-specific installation at MASS MoCA's Building 5 hums and chugs like an intricate machine producing reams of data and culture. Some mental assembly is required.

Pallets rise to the ceiling like Mayan ruins. Large shipping containers reveal humanity inside but lack any people, just what they've left behind. Amplified with a sound system, an 18-foot catwalk supported by a metal scaffold clings and clangs as you walk, echoing through the vast area, suggesting the shakiness of it all — the impermanence of civilization and all the stuff we make.

Wire snakes scuttle on the floor. Steel barrels almost tip over as white flags lean toward the floor. A jumbled mess of scrap metal is ready to collapse. Jutting upward with temple-like qualities, a reclaimed forklift reconstituted with resin, acrylic and foam is a tenuous beacon.

Artist Liz Glynn's contraption is a sprawling yet orderly assemblage of industrialization and its discontents and how unsustainable the things are. The tension is palatable: impending doom seems near. It confides in us, sharing details here and there, but also confronts with opaque layers of meaning, leaving you adrift in a sea of materiality.

The lifeline is the detailed how-to manual that fills in the gaps, brushing away the mildew of time to find a sense of the future through the discarded past. It's wonderful strand of culture in itself. Diagrams dig deeper into what all the individual cogs in the production mean, providing the metadata for greater understanding.

Seeking more perspective, we chatted with the Los Angeles-based Glynn via email. Here are excerpts:

Q: Were you working conceptually on the idea for this exhibition or was it triggered by the space and MASS MoCa's history? Or a combination of both?

A: For many years, my work has used objects to trace shifts in cultural value. As a sculptor, I was interested in exploring what it means to make "stuff" today, at a time when many of my friends work in industries where most of their labor is done behind a laptop.

I visited the gallery about a year and a half before the show, when it was nearly empty, and spent about a week walking back and forth through the space, and occasionally asking someone on the exhibitions team to take me up in the lift. I developed the labyrinthine trajectory through the space by walking the length of it over and over, figuring out where I wanted a visitor to move slowly, and where the trajectory should accelerate. I traced my path with a piece of mason twine, and charted the resulting line on paper using a tape measure, and then dropped this into a Rhino 3-D model, where it became the basis of the entire installation.

Q: Much of the installation is about perspective and subjectivity, in which scale plays a big part in the relationship of the objects to the viewer. Have you worked with indoor space this big before? What were the challenges?

A: I believe Building 5 is the largest single gallery space in the country, so it's certainly a unique opportunity. So the short answer is no. One thing people don't realize is that the space is five times as long as it is wide. Your perspective is collapsed from either end, and it really unfolds as you move through it. For me, a central challenge was planning the installation in advance without being able to see the work physically in the space, as I have a lot of trouble understanding how something will feel when modeling it in virtual space.

Q: Although large, the installation comes across as quite intimate through "access" points like catwalks that bring the viewer in and jostle their connection to the various objects. Are you specifically trying to interject a sense of performance within the inanimate?

A: Though there is only one figurative work in the show, the installation is designed to activate the visitor's body. It's physically impossible to experience the show without making a lot of twists and turns through the space. I'm interested in the ways that people can derive meaning intuitively through their experience of objects in space.

Q: There are many narratives in the install. Can you sum up the primary story you're trying to convey?

A: Essentially, the show seeks to ask what happens to stuff, and the people who used to make stuff, in an age when technological progress is accelerating, currency is exchanged digitally and startups can attain billion dollar valuations without producing anything physical. What will happen to our bodies? How will our minds continue to analyze information in real time when silicon chips can process data much faster? Can making function as a site of resistance and affirmation of our own humanity?